Witch Way Out (Witch Detectives #3) (8 page)

“Oh, trust me, you aren’t, but this is important, and it is obviously worrying you. Why else would you chase down every small magical thing that comes your way?”

“I have a responsibility—”

“It is possible to take on too much responsibility. I have lived for a long time. I have met so many people. Their lives are their own. The most I can do—the most we can do—is to live alongside them, allowing them to live their own ways. We cannot hope to take responsibility for so many of them.”

“Would you be saying the same if something affected Marie, Kelly or David? One of your staff?”

Niall shrugged. “But these things do not. They touch on strangers.”

“Which is,” I pointed out, “why I’m getting paid for it. It’s my job, Niall.”

“It’s your job to hunt for the ghost of an enchantress who has been dead for months?”

I shook my head. “With Victoria, I just want to be certain. You were the one who said she might survive.”

“And our lives would have been simpler if I had not said it,” Niall said. “But you are right. We should not be talking about her here and now. There are so many better things we could be—”

You’d think that in a place like Niall’s, everyone would learn to knock before they came into a room. Apparently though, Niall’s assistant Marie either hadn’t got that message or was in too much of a hurry. She was good looking, in a professional kind of way, with neat dark hair, a suit that was a little too somber for her and pretty features that were currently not quite looking at us.

Oh, right.
I snatched up as much of the sheet as possible, trying to arrange it so that it covered slightly more. Niall didn’t seem as bothered, going over to fetch his clothes.

“What is it, Marie?” he asked.

“Sorry to…um, interrupt. It’s just that there’s a goblin here to see Elle, and it’s apparently quite important.”

Very important, if she was going to risk the possibility of catching us in the middle of sex. I hunted around for my clothing, and grabbed it quickly when Niall passed it to me. He seemed to be the only one of us not embarrassed by the situation. Frankly, even Marie seemed less embarrassed than I was. Maybe that had something to do with all the things she’d recently been getting up to with Fergie in my stationery cupboard.

I frowned, misunderstanding for a moment. “Siobhan’s here?”

Marie shook her head. “Not Siobhan, a goblin I don’t know. He says he was sent with a message and that he has to deliver it to you personally. He was going to barge straight in here before I stopped him.”

That did sound urgent. It also sounded like a risk Marie shouldn’t have taken. If she’d gotten in the way of the wrong goblin, they wouldn’t have stopped to let her explain. Some of them would have just left her bleeding. I didn’t want to have to explain something like that to Fergie. I didn’t want it to happen at all.

“Um…can you tell him I’ll be out in a minute?”

Marie nodded and left to do just that. I did my best to clean up and dress as quickly as I could, trying to present the kind of image of strength and control that most goblins respected.

“We’ve got goblins visiting us?” I said to Niall as I smoothed down my skirt as best I could.

“Visiting
you
,” he pointed out. “This one knew to find you at my house.”

“Meaning that they’re either watching me, or they’ve just been paying attention for the last few months. It’s not exactly a secret. What do you think they’ll want?”

Niall shrugged. “There is really only one way to find that out. Shall we?”

I nodded and we stepped out into the hall together. There was indeed a goblin there, with Niall’s blonde cook, Kelly, keeping an eye on him. The goblin was one of those who seemed to be designed to remind people that the word didn’t just cover the traditional image of them. That it was simply a catchall term for any fey who were inimical to humans. This one was tall and so handsome he was almost painful to look at, with silvery, almost glowing skin, slightly sharp features flowing back to ever-so-slightly pointed ears, deep silver hair and eyes that seemed entirely white and empty. He was wearing scraps of leather patched together so that it seemed like he was a kind of moving collage.

He bowed low as he saw me, but I couldn’t help seeing the smirk that flickered over his features, as if to let me know that he knew exactly what Niall and I had been up to, and exactly how embarrassed I was that he knew.

“Lady Elle, I am Luc. I have the honor of being sent to invite you to meet with the leaders of the goblin folk of this city.” There was something slightly old-fashioned about the way he spoke and dressed, something that suggested he was older than he looked. “They believe you have much to discuss.”

Something about his tone suggested that he didn’t see things quite the same way.

“If your leaders want to meet,” Niall said, half-stepping in front of me. “Let them come here.”

“Alas, there are those who would not take such a meeting well, and in any case, the sun is strong and painful to our kind. No, the lady must come to them.”

“Why would I do that?” I said. “The last I heard, I wasn’t exactly welcome back Underneath.”

That smirk was back. “That is one of the things they wish to discuss with you. Along with the way this city is going. Oh, and your mother. They said to tell you that they wished to talk about your mother.”

Edinburgh’s Vaults started life as an architectural accident, arches underneath eighteenth century Edinburgh’s South Bridge that quickly became a home to taverns and traders, illicit activities and worse. It was simply the way bridges were used in those days. Today, parts of them were used for a nightclub, while others played host to ghost tours and historical walks. Apparently, the vaults were a good place to see the inexplicable and the unexplained, the supernatural and those things merely suggested by the tour guides until everyone had convinced themselves that they could see them.

I found myself wondering as I headed down into them what people would think if they knew about the goblins I was going to meet. Would they run from the place screaming? Would they think that they were all just part of the tourist attraction? What would they think if they knew about me?

There were certainly things that they didn’t know about the vaults. There were ways through from them into the deeper realms beneath the city. The realms that the goblins called home. And not just the goblins. Niall had once told me that the enchantress, Victoria, had used this place as a base once upon a time. She had kept him imprisoned there the way she had once tried to imprison me.

“How much further?” I asked Luc, walking alongside him like we were just another pair of tourists there to soak up the atmosphere.

“My employers will meet you in the far arch,” he said. He reached out, taking my hand and bending over it to kiss it in a way that seemed to send a thrill of electricity through me. I could feel the desire he felt when he looked at me only too easily. “I hope that I will see you again, Elle Chambers.”

He slipped off into one of the nearer arches, quickly disappearing out of sight through some hidden door. I’d come down here on the assumption that he was going to lead me right to the people I was meant to meet. I should have known that the goblin wasn’t going to stick to the script.

In theory, I should have turned around and walked away then. That was the plan. If anything unexpected happened, I was to get out of there as quickly as I could. Niall was waiting outside, ready to come in if I needed him or if I wasn’t back inside an hour. Fergie was standing by with Rebecca’s phone number ready to call, not that I had any real expectation that she would come. We were taking every precaution we could think of.

And why not? The goblins had plenty of reasons to hate me. How many of them had died when I’d brought Victoria’s throne room down around their ears? I couldn’t see them forgiving something like that very easily. I was only there at all because I was quite sure I could defend myself against anything a goblin could throw at me directly. Well, that and the sheer unexpectedness of their request to meet.

It wasn’t late yet, so there weren’t that many people in the club. It was dark in there, with only brief flashes of light giving glimpses of the people around me. The music wasn’t uncomfortably loud, but it would certainly serve to mask any conversation I had.

I spotted the goblins in a booth at one of the far corners of the place. I picked them up by the taste of their emotions first, but as I got closer, I could see that at least one of them wasn’t making any effort to hide his far-from-human features. Not all goblins looked like the classic image of them, but this one definitely did. He had small tusks sticking up from the corners of his mouth, skin of a deep greenish-gray and eyes that reflected faintly red in the near dark.

“Ms. Chambers, please take a seat. We’ve been waiting for you.”

I couldn’t sense a threat from him, although I was a little more concerned about the other two. One of them was male and the other female. The male looked like a strange kind of hybrid of the beautiful and the grotesque, so that smooth, almost luminous, skin found itself marred by obvious goblin features. When he smiled, his teeth came to sharp points, and blood wept slowly and continuously from the corners of his eyes. By contrast, the female looked almost normal. Well, normal probably wasn’t the right word. She still had patches of silvery scales on her skin, and her close-cropped hair was a very familiar bone-white. It occurred to me that the reason she looked so normal was that she looked quite a lot like Siobhan.

“Ulm said sit down, vampire.” The other male goblin’s voice was like gravel, and I could feel the aggression behind it.

“We aren’t here for violence, Kal,” the first goblin said. “Ms. Chambers, I am Ulm, this is Kal and Nea.”

“Interesting names.”

“We have no need for human names,” Kal snapped back at me.

The woman, Nea, put a hand on his arm. It seemed to calm him down. “If Ulm wants to talk, we talk. Remember, she has been looking after one of ours.”

“Siobhan?” I looked at her closely. “You know Siobhan?”

“That’s the name she’s using above ground?” the female goblin nodded. “We were part of the same clan, Underneath.”

I didn’t know enough about goblin society to know exactly what that meant. Were they related, or was the similarity of their appearance just coincidence? With goblins, it was impossible to tell.

“We’ll get to that, Nea. Ms. Chambers?”

I sat down. After all, I’d come this far. “You wanted to see me?”

“I wanted to meet you.” Ulm held out one sharp-clawed hand. I forced myself to take it. “You have acquired an impressive reputation, and I felt that there were things we should talk over without risking being seen.”

“She’s not that impressive,” Kal insisted.

I couldn’t help laughing. Thankfully, Nea managed to get a grip on the male goblin before he surged forward.

“You don’t laugh at Ulm!” Kal snarled.

“Actually,” I said, “I was laughing because it feels like I’ve been in this position before recently. Meeting with three people, one of whom is a little prone to temper tantrums…did you model yourselves on the coven trio deliberately?”

 The leader of the three ignored Kal’s obvious anger at that. “So, you’ve met with them?”

I nodded.

“Can I ask you what you talked about?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think you’d appreciate it if I went and told them about
this
meeting, so I’m hardly going to tell you about
that
one.”

Ulm nodded. “That’s understandable, and what I hoped you might say. You have integrity. Can I make one suggestion, though?”

“You don’t have to speak to her like that,” Kal insisted. “You’re our leader. You—”

“Kal.” For a moment, just a moment, I saw the power the lead goblin had. Enough that his obviously firebrand assistant stopped dead.

“I’m always open to advice,” I said. “Although there’s the obvious question of why you would want to give me any. From what I understand, I’m not exactly the most popular of people with the goblins right now.”

“What gave you that idea?” Ulm asked. “Because you brought down a few tunnels? Hurt a few fools? You helped to stop a woman who wanted to control us utterly. You freed our people from her as much as the people you rescued. We should thank you for that.”

I looked around the rest of the table. “Why do I get the feeling that if I walked into the Underneath, not everyone would feel the same way?”

“Not everyone would,” the goblin leader admitted. “Many would want you dead. Some of our faction feel that you are a puppet of the coven. A tool to oppress us.”

That made me bridle a little. “I’m no one’s puppet. Least of all, theirs.”

“I see that.” Ulm looked at me for several seconds, the red of his eyes seeming to wash over me. “Tell me, Elle, why did you kill Victoria?”

I caught the shift to my first name. “Because she had hurt people I care about. Because she’d murdered people and tricked me. Because she needed to be stopped.”

“Because it was the right thing to do?”